Contributor Terms

Last Updated: July 10, 2026

Arkyn welcomes contributions of code, documentation, examples, and other material from the community. To keep this simple and consistent with how large open-source projects (including the Linux kernel and Kubernetes) handle contributor licensing, Arkyn uses the lightweight Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) model instead of a signed Contributor License Agreement. There is no separate document to sign — certifying the statement in Section 3 is built into how you submit a contribution (Section 4).

See Arkyn Legal Documentation for the shared glossary. In this document, "Contribution" means any code, documentation, translation, design asset, or other material you submit to an official Arkyn repository, by pull request or otherwise.

By making a Contribution to Arkyn, you certify the following, which is the official, unmodified Developer Certificate of Origin, Version 1.1, as published at developercertificate.org:

In plain language, by contributing you are confirming that: (1) you wrote the contribution or otherwise have the right to submit it, (2) you are not knowingly submitting material that infringes someone else's rights, and (3) you understand your contribution — including your name and email in the sign-off — will be part of the project's public history indefinitely.

Certification is given by adding a Signed-off-by line to your commit message, using your real name and a valid email address:

If you use Git, this is added automatically with the -s flag:

Pull requests without a sign-off may be asked to add one before being merged. Anonymous or pseudonymous contributions are not accepted, consistent with clause (d) of the Certificate above.

Consistent with License Section 6 (which incorporates Section 5, "Submission of Contributions," of the Apache License, Version 2.0), unless you explicitly state otherwise in writing, any Contribution you intentionally submit for inclusion in an Arkyn repository is licensed to the project under the same Apache License 2.0 terms that govern Arkyn's Software, without any additional terms or conditions. You retain copyright in your Contribution; you are simply licensing it to the project (and, through the Apache License, to everyone who uses Arkyn) on the same terms as the rest of the codebase.

By contributing, you also represent that submitting your Contribution does not violate any agreement you have with a third party (for example, an employer's intellectual property assignment policy). If your employer or another party has rights to work you create, you confirm you have permission to contribute that work to Arkyn under these terms, or that you are contributing only work you created entirely on your own time and resources, as applicable under your own arrangements.

Contributions are accepted under the license terms in Section 5 above; they do not carry with them any right to use the Arkyn name, logo, or other Marks beyond what Brand, Trademark & Copyright Policy already permits. For example, contributing a new component to @arkyn/components does not give you the right to publish or market that component separately under an "Arkyn" branded name without permission.

As stated in clause (d) of the Certificate above, contributions — including pull requests, issues, discussions, and commit history containing your name and email — are public and are retained indefinitely as part of the project's history. See Privacy Policy for more on how this interacts with personal data you include in public contributions.

If you are not able to certify the Developer Certificate of Origin for a particular contribution — for example, because it incorporates code you don't have clear rights to — please do not submit it, or raise the situation with the Maintainer before submitting so it can be discussed.

Questions about contributing or these terms: lucasgoncalves@arkyn.dev, or open a discussion on the relevant GitHub repository.